I guessed that it would take Lish some time for the truth about the busker to set in, to take hold and make her react. She was acting kind of weird, but she always did, so that wasn’t a big deal. She kept looking at me oddly, sort of smiling, like she wanted to ask me a stupid question but was kind of shy about it. If she had given up the hope of ever seeing Gotcha again she had replaced it with a kind of silliness. Well, maybe that’s a form of grief, I thought. She talked about their week together five years ago, and how she actually had never really known him and had gone for months at a time without ever thinking about him and how the twins had never known him either and never would and it’s too bad he died for sure, but she didn’t quite know how to feel. I understood. All the guys I’d had sex with, some even for a week or more, were vague fuzzy lost people I couldn’t really remember. That one of them could be Dill’s father was absurd. That the reason for his existence, which was such a big event in my life, was some man I couldn’t remember, some shadowy figure I couldn’t place, seemed crazy.
It was a strange sensation. Even knowing so much about Dill didn’t automatically make me know his father. Sometimes you wonder. Like Nike running shoes. I saw a show about the people who make them: sour-looking Asian women getting a few bucks a day making shoes that sold for a hundred bucks a pair. Sometimes you just wonder where these things come from. But usually you don’t. Usually I just enjoyed Dill without wondering how exactly he got here.
Anyway, Lish felt good that the busker had been trying to reach her, that it would have been a chance for the kids to meet him. But would he have come back again and again or just fizzled out and left the kids feeling that awful feeling of loss instead of just curiosity, which is a lot easier? He didn’t even know that he had kids and probably she would think he was alone and horny when he wrote the postcards and realized Winnipeg wasn’t too far from Denver—and hadn’t he had a good time with some woman from Winnipeg once upon a time? Maybe it could happen again. Sometimes that’s what Lish figured he was thinking. And sometimes, it seemed she believed he wanted only her, in a tender, spiritual kind of way. At least that’s what she said. As for me, I didn’t know which was worse.
When we stopped at the border, the guy asked us had we purchased any firearms, telephones or pets. Lish said, “Yes, and a large quantity of drugs and lesbian porn we are hoping to sell in schoolyards.” Fortunately Dill had woken up when the van stopped moving and was hollering as loud as he could and the guy didn’t understand Lish and said, “Yes it is, isn’t it.”
Getting back into Canada was a breeze. They had to let us in even if they didn’t want to. When we passed my mom’s ditch and the honey sign, Lish asked, “Do you want to stop?” and I said, after a couple of seconds of wavering and Lish’s foot hovering between the brake and the gas pedals and an enquiring expression on her face, “No.”
Lish told us a story about her mother and father. It was the girls’ favourite. The twins liked to hear it over and over. Both Lish’s parents had been raised on farms. Farming was the main event. Her mother’s family bought John Deere equipment and that was fine. But when their daughter, Lish’s mom, began dating her neighbour, Lish’s dad, the shit hit the fan, because Lish’s father’s family used Massey Ferguson equipment. In that area there was an ongoing feud between John Deere users and Massey Ferguson users. Something about the French buying one brand and the Ukrainians buying another, originally. Both camps swore up and down that theirs was the best, and because farming was their life, it was a big deal. So, for a John Deere girl and a Massey Ferguson boy to be dating, that was asking for trouble. It was like the Montagues and the Capulets. In the only café in the neighbouring town the John Deere clan sat on one side and the Massey Ferguson sat on the other. Sometimes the more good-natured farmers would try a little bit of friendly debate with someone from the other side, but they’d get glared down so fast even the waitress forgot to refill their coffee cups for the rest of the day. (The waitress’s family was a Massey Ferguson family, but she said as long as there was no fighting, she’d serve the John Deeres in the restaurant same as everyone else.) Everyone waited eagerly for someone from the other side to get their arm cut off or a piston blown because of a faulty part, but when it happened to one of their own it was very hush-hush. Repairs were done in the night, so no one from the other side would notice there was a problem.
New farmers were courted and wooed by both sides and it was always tough for them to make the choice. Usually it depended on whom the kids played with: even when they’re fighting over farm machinery, parents want their kids to be happy. So potential farm equipment buyers bought John Deere if their kids were best friends with a John Deere family, and Massey Ferguson if it was the other way around. Farm families are very loyal to their friends. So anyway, Lish’s mom and Lish’s dad couldn’t help falling in love even though they knew it was a dangerous thing to do. Neither one of them gave a damn about farming, let alone farm equipment. When Lish’s mother’s father found out about the courtship, he said, “I forbid you to see that boy,” and her mother turned around to face the stove. The whole feud was really a male thing. The farm women just sighed mostly. And Lish’s mom said, “But I love him. I love him more than I’ve ever loved any old John Deere plow. Yeah, if I get pregnant I’m going to name my baby Massey Ferguson!” She yelled it out at the top of her lungs. Well, this was too much for Lish’s mother’s father. He stood up and said, “If I ever, ever, ever hear you speak those two words again I will banish you from this house and you will never be allowed to return, so help me god.” Lish’s mom’s mother said, “Oh, honey, sit down.”
Lish’s mom said, “Fine. This whole place stinks like pigs anyway and there’s nothing to do. If your John Deere crap is more important than your own daughter, why don’t you just go out there and . . . and . . and screw it. Goodbye. Mom, I’ll call you later. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye dear. Are you sure you don’t want supper before you go?”
“Yes. I’m sure.” She slammed the door behind her. Lish’s mom was off to find her Massey Ferguson man and start a new life off the farm. On her way down the long driveway to the gravel road she passed a John Deere hauler parked on the side, and she removed her panties and flung them onto the hauler. Then she flipped up her skirt and mooned the whole lot of them, her mother, her father, the pigs, the barn, the flies, the sadness, the boredom, the stink, the John Deere equipment.
“And,” said Lish, finishing the story, “I think that was my mom’s first and last act of rebellion. Isn’t it amazing how men fall head over heels in love with wild women and then turn them into doormats?”
I asked, “Why didn’t she name her first baby Massey Ferguson?”
“Oh well, by then she wasn’t so angry. Too bad really. She hasn’t been angry since. Just sighs at the stove.”
We were approaching the city limits. We passed a sign that read “Congratulations Winnipeg and Welcome Visitors! Bite rate down from 48 bites per minute to two!!! We’ve survived!!!” And there was a bad painting of a family of mosquitoes holding suitcases waiting at an old-fashioned outdoor train platform.
“Oh well, that should draw the tourists,” said Lish.
As we were rounding the corner of Broadway and Main, the sliding door on the van fell off. Luckily the kids didn’t fall out, but a bunch of clothes and diapers and garbage and toys that were leaning up against it did and ended up lying all over the street. We were almost home, so Lish stopped and heaved the door into the van. “MOVE OVER, KIDS,” she yelled. “I’M PUTTING THE DOOR IN HERE.” I picked up all our stuff from the street. Some people honked. Others peeled around us and gave us the finger. Some just looked at us. “OKAY, DON’T FALL OUT OF THE VAN, JUST STAY WHERE YOU ARE. LET’S JUST GET THIS PIECE OF CRAP HOME. I’LL DRIVE SLOW. HI EVERYBODY, WE’RE BACK. FRIENDLY MANITOBA. DIDJA MISS US????” Lish yelled at everyone around and waved and smiled. “Fucking impatient sons of bitches,” she muttered under her breath.
“Mom,” said Maya. “You’re supposed to say I’ll drive slow-lee. Mrs. Loopnik says so.”
“Yeah, Mom,” said Hope.
“Yeah, Mom,” said Alba.
“Yeah, Mom,” said Letitia.
“If I had PMS I could slaughter you all and not do a day of time.”
“You always have PMS, Mom,” said Hope.
“Yeah, ha ha, permanent menstrool system,” said Maya.
“Ha ha, good one.”
“Ha ha, yourselves, what do you mean always, I’m always pregnant. You can’t have both. Mrs. Loopy ever tell you that? And you girls call yourselves educated. Hey, hey, look people, it’s Sing Dylan. He’s still scrubbing that old fence! Some things never change, boy oh boy.”
Sing Dylan turned around and waved, And Lish honked the horn MEEP MEEP MEEP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEP as we drove up to the front doors of good old Half-a-Life.
Stuff had definitely happened at Half-a-Life over the very short time we had been away. Mostly it was that the sun had come out, and that had changed everything. Kids were running around the parking lot, and riding tricycles, bikes, roller blades, skateboards. Old rusty barbecues had been chained to light fixtures and other parking signs in the parking lot, and bags of charcoal were sitting underneath them. Some of the older kids were chucking bags of charcoal at each other. Obscene sidewalk chalk drawings were everywhere, kids falling down and howling, mothers standing around and smoking and talking. Other mothers were leaning against their balconies, shouting instructions and being ignored. Terrapin was squatting in a leftover puddle looking at waterbugs with her daughters, pointing at something with a grave expression on her face. Sing Dylan had almost removed all of the FUCK THE RICH THAN EAT THEM graffiti on the North Wall. He should have been happy, but he seemed kind of sad, worried. Then we saw Teresa.
She had cut off her hair and left a couple of long strands in the back. She was wearing a yellow tank top and cut-offs. She was running for our van barefoot over the little pebbles on the parking lot and so she kind of hobbled and grimaced and swore the whole way over. The way she was hunched over and wearing a tank top and rushing so eagerly and everything reminded me of the old lady tourists you see in Vegas. Terrapin called out to her to come and see the beautiful bug and Teresa said, “Get a fucking life Hairpin ouch ouch.” I thought she was very desperate to get her cheap smokes and again I wished that she would play along with this death thing a bit better. But when she finally made it to the van, she didn’t mention the cigarettes or Gotcha’s death or the postcard or the trip or ask how’re the kids or what’s the van door doing in the van. She ran to Lish’s window and heaved her giant yellow breasts onto the door frame and panted for a few seconds and then said in one breath like a big yellow balloon losing all its air, “Hurry up, you gotta hurry Mercy’s in labour! She refuses to go to the hospital. She said the last time she was in the hospital to have Zara they almost killed her. She refuses to lie down and give birth until her stupid apartment is sterile, so a bunch of us are busy trying to get it ready for her to have the baby and it’s early so her midwife, we didn’t even know she was fucking pregnant, isn’t around and she says she can just do it by herself but not until the place is totally clean and so hurry!!!”
“What did you say! Mercy! In labour? Are you serious? This is a joke, right?” Lish was already parking the van in front of Half-a-Life.
I thought to myself, wait, not another set-up. Poor Lish. I thought I was the only one lying to her. Maybe Teresa had really got into all that secrecy and plotting and didn’t want it to end. But how would she see the end of this one? She’s not some kind of Steven Spielberg even if she wants to be a flagger on film sets. You can’t just fake a new baby. At least not in Half-a-Life, where everyone has more than enough experience with real ones. This was getting ridiculous. Mercy hadn’t even looked pregnant. But then again she was always wearing those big longsleeved men’s shirts. And Mercy? Pregnant? When had she ever had the opportunity to get pregnant? She was always so organized, every second of her day planned and what was this about sterile? Her place was always sterile. But Teresa, who was huffing and puffing, trying to jog alongside the van as we pulled in, wasn’t finished. “And Luce, your dad’s here too and whatsisname, that guy you had at your place when Podborczintski showed up. They’re both in Mercy’s apartment trying to help. I think they’re doing the bathroom.”
“What? My dad? Hart? Teresa, are you sure, what are they doing here? Geez, Teresa, are you positive you know what you’re talking about? Geeeez, Teresa.”
I gave her a really nasty look like she had gone too far and could we all please just be normal and truthful again. I couldn’t remember the last time I had given anybody such a nasty look. And I began to feel bad ’cause it was Teresa, after all, who had been my trusty accomplice in the Gotcha affair. I felt I was to blame, giving her a taste of subterfuge, and now she couldn’t get enough. But she didn’t seem to notice. She just started hauling all the girls and Dill out of the van and rushing us all up the stairs to Mercy’s apartment.
“My dad? Hart? Why are they here, Teresa?” I yelled at her in the stairwell.
“I don’t know. Your dad’s basement got flooded. The toilet backed up or something and there’s shit all over and he had nowhere else to go. He thought he could use your place while you was gone and Hart was here to see Sing Dylan.”
“Sing Dylan? Why Sing Dylan?”
“’Cause. Something about him defending him in court. Sing Dylan finally managed to reroute all the water over to Serenity Place. And now they’re flooding like crazy over there, at least they were a couple of days ago before the rain stopped, and they threatened to take Sing Dylan to court and ’cause he’s an illegal immigrant and everything he’d be sent home pronto and so I found whatsisname’s calling card at your place when I was checking it for leaks and called him and he said he’d defend Sing Dylan for free ’cause he really needed experience anyway ha ha in all areas, eh Luce?? But now he’s busy with your dad helping Mercy, and Sing Dylan is back at the wall. He tried to help for a while but he got too nervous so he went back to his wall. He was just doing that rerouting for Sarah. For her honour, you know. It was revenge. But as far as I’m concerned it wasn’t nearly enough. I mean what’s a kid compared to a flooded basement? Anyway, I think that’s like a cultural thing for him. Or whatever. Because of what the bitches in Serenity Place said about her and Emmanuel and him being taken away and everything. Hurry up!”
Okay. All that stuff about Sing Dylan flooding Serenity Place made sense, sort of. But my dad at Half-a-Life? Assisting in a homebirth? He hadn’t even seen Dill, let alone changed his diaper or kissed his cheek. I don’t know if he had ever held a baby or not. I guess he had held me, but he certainly hadn’t seen me being born back then, and he never really exhibited any interest in babies or children. I don’t recall him ever even saying the word pregnant. The odd time he had to refer to some pregnant woman, he said “expecting.” And now he was ready to get his hands covered in afterbirth?
All eight of us flew into Mercy’s apartment. The girls were terribly excited about Mercy’s new baby, or the prospect of Mercy’s new baby. Dill was looking alert, too, Teresa was all business, Lish was mildly amused and puzzled by it all, and I, stupidly, began to cry. If this much could happen, find a beginning and an end, and lead to more and more events transpiring, over a short period of three days, then how much had happened over the three years since my mother had died? And how would I be able to remember her when so much was happening? I was afraid to blink for a second or shift my thoughts to Mercy’s baby or Dill or my dad or Sing Dylan for fear I’d lose her. So much was happening. And not only that, but things were happening without me making them happen. What wasn’t happening was my mom wasn’t catching a flight home to Winnipeg from somewhere in South America and John Dillinger wasn’t alive and well living under some pseudonym in Des Moines or anywhere else. Gotcha, dead or alive, was never going to show up and neither was Dill’s father, the way Podborczintski kept hoping he would. I hoped Lish’s crying trick would make me look great, too, ’cause now there was no turning back. If Siskel and Ebert had been reviewing this scene they would have said my crying looked fake and exaggerated, because I was heaving and my face was all distorted and really I was a mess. But when you see people, you know, bawling their heads off, looking scary and awful, believe me it’s real. They feel bad, it’s not an act. I couldn’t bear to lose her all over again, the woman I had created in my mind. Speeding down the highway with her elbow resting on the door and her hand tapping on the roof of the car. At that moment, all I wanted was to have my mother back.
The thing is, at that moment, there were about twelve people all rushing around Mercy’s apartment trying to make it sterile and my breakdown went entirely unnoticed. Which was good because it probably wouldn’t have been too good for the baby’s karma and energy and all that to have some unstable kid crying for her dead mom in the same room at the moment it was being born. I was standing frozen in the kitchen of Mercy’s apartment dealing with the rest of my life while everyone else had poured in looking to play a role in the story of Mercy’s baby’s birth.
I decided to wash my face, that old cure for everything that ails you. Wash your face. All you gotta do is just wash your face. Splash splash. At the end of the hall I could see Mercy kneeling on her hands and knees groaning, “Is it ready, is it ready? Just fucking tell me, is the fucking thing ready or what ooohhhhhhaaaahhhhhhhhh ooh okay okay okay okay hang on baby!” She started yelling, “OOOOOOOOOHHH WOULD SOMEBODY PLEASE TELL ME IS THE FUCKING THING CLEAN OR IS THAT ASKING TOO MUAMAAAAAAHHHHHHH!”
I had Dill on my hip and I quickly headed for the bathroom. I could see Angela and Lish and Teresa already rubbing Mercy’s back and smoothing her hair and murmuring encouraging things, and like I said, the last thing Mercy needed right then was me, the grim reaper. I opened the bathroom door and then I remembered what Teresa had told us on the stairs. My dad and Hart were cleaning the bathroom. Sure enough, there they were. We all looked at one another, and then I laughed and I laughed. Then I sat down on the toilet and I laughed some more. My dad and Hart were kneeling at the tub and scrubbing it with some kind of organic cleanser. The sink already gleamed and I could see my reflection in the tiles on the bathroom floor. My dad and Hart had sanitary napkins taped onto their knees—to cushion them or to keep them dry or to keep the common bacteria on their pants from getting onto the floor, who knows? They only stopped for a second to turn around and look at me.
“Hi, Lucy,” said my dad. “We’ll have to talk later. I’ve been put to work.”
“Hi, Lucy,” said Hart, with a less serious expression on his face. “I came here to get some legal experience, but now . . .”
And he and I burst out laughing. My dad turned around and almost smiled and touched Dill’s arm. He kept his hand on Dill’s arm, looking at it, and then, finally, he spoke. “From what I understand your friend has chosen to deliver the child in the bathtub,” he said.
This made Hart and me crack up all over again. I couldn’t believe my dad was cleaning a tub for some single woman in public housing who wanted to have her baby in the bath. And wearing sanitary napkins on his knees!
“If your fucking family reunion is over I wouldn’t mind having my fucking baby already if nobody fucking minds OOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHH I don’t care if it’s covered in dirt fill the tub and let’s do it OOOHAAAAHAHHHAOOOH!!”
My dad and Hart snapped to attention. If they were upset with Mercy’s language, they certainly didn’t let on. My dad filled the tub, expertly, I might add, feeling the water, swooshing it around to make it the same warm temperature everywhere. Hart got a bunch of towels ready and took on the same stern expression my dad had. They were totally focussed. These were men, finally, with a mission. I got the hell out of that bathroom just in time. Mercy lumbered in, telling everyone around her to just fuck off, and plunged into the tub. She yelled, “I JUST NEED ONE OF YOU TO CHECK THE CORD AND CATCH THE BABY. THIS BABY’S GONNA BE BORN ANY SECOND AND I MEAN ANY SECOND!!!” Immediately, Hart ran out of the room, leaving my dad the job. Teresa and Lish offered to do it instead but Mercy told them, “Keep all your kids away from the bathroom,” and “Lucy’s dad can hold me up if I need it.” I barely heard my dad murmur something like, “But I . . . but I have never in my life done anything like this—” and Mercy answer him with, “Listen, it’s pretty fucking straightforward. I’m having a baby here, alright? Just do what I tell yaaaaAAAAHHHH—” I caught a glimpse of my dad’s face just before Mercy yelled at him to shut the fucking door and he looked, well, he looked terrified. Kind of like the way he looked when he found out my mom was dead. I tried not to worry about him in there. I figured if we could all survive being born, then he could survive watching someone being born. I mean, I had never heard of, you know, the midwife or the obstetrician dying in childbirth. And the way Mercy had been clomping around swearing and screaming, I wasn’t worried about her dying. So. Nobody was dying. That was good.
Lish and Angela and Hart and Teresa and Dill and me sat in the kitchen quietly, drinking coffee, making sure we didn’t leave a mess, sometimes getting up and walking over to the balcony to watch the girls, who had become bored with the whole thing by this time and were playing in the parking lot in the sunshine. We were in shock. Mercy having a baby was the last thing we thought would happen at Half-a-Life. And why hadn’t she told us? We could have helped out. Then again, it would be a great feeling of accomplishment to have kept a secret for that long, nine months, or actually, eight, in a place like Half-a-Life. Finally Teresa said it: “So does anybody know who the father is?” and all of us just kind of gawked at each other and shook our heads and, naturally, wondered.
It was kind of a sacred time, the actual birth and everything, so none of us, even Lish, made any cracks about who it might be, though we were thinking about it, and later on, maybe in a day or two, we’d be trying to find out and coming up with our own ridiculous scenarios. Birth is a special thing, but in Half-a-Life we all start our nosing around very shortly afterwards. Not only us, but the dole, too. In the lives of the kids of Half-a-Life there were only a few days of freedom, of possibility; of what-ifs, before the dole swept in and took snapshots, fingerprinted, and filed all available data on the origins and future of this child, case number whatever it was. And all the questioning started.
While the other women talked about their own birth stories and revelled in the special conspiratorial mood of the occasion and Hart played with Dill, I sat on Mercy’s kitchen chair trying to sort things out. My mother’s death, Mercy’s baby, Gotcha’s fake death, Dill’s unknown father, my own father, who right now was helping to deliver the baby of a perfect stranger. He had never even seen Dill until tonight, his own grandson, and now suddenly he was Geoffrey Van Alstyne, midwife to the poor. I got up and walked over to the bathroom door. I listened to my dad saying over and over, slowly, in a soft voice filled with confidence, “Very good, very good, very good.” I sat down on the floor in the hallway and listened to him coax the new life out of Mercy, a woman he had never met until then. At the end of the hall I saw Lish move towards the fridge and stop for a second, on the way, to make a shadow puppet with her hand in the square of sunlight on Mercy’s wall. I could see Hart, awkwardly pretending to chew Dill’s toes off, and I saw Dill’s big wet mouth open, chuckling. If my mother had been in this apartment, she would have reflected happiness. If my mother was a mirror, like she said, I would have seen myself smile. And if my mother had been there she would have seen my life, and she and my dad would have spoken the words together, “Very good, very good, very good.”